Changes to Advanced Queues

Captain's Blog Stardate 93055.04

Cryptic is rolling out some changes to the Advanced missions in the PvE queue, all of which sound good, but perhaps they are too good. I'm going to discuss the various points that were in the recent dev blog about this, and hopefully come to a final conclusion because frankly I'm on the fence.

First of all optional objectives in Normal stay as optionals in Advanced which provide additional rewards if achieved. This essentially removes the possibility of failing a mission. What I like about this is that it still provides the challenge that it should as an Advanced mission, but also gives players a chance to practice without failing because of a poor team. On the other hand, the whole purpose of being able to fail was so that players who weren't ready for this difficulty level wouldn't play them.

If you don't complete any objectives, Normal and Advanced provide the same exact rewards. WHAT?! I partially disagree, but the next part kind of makes up for this. The optionals give greater rewards in Advanced. So perhaps this is the incentive players need to improve their characters when advancing through the difficulty levels. Still, I find it weird that without optionals they reward the same thing.

So the major differences between Normal and Advanced are stronger enemies and increased optional rewards. Of course the usual Advanced rewards still exist, such as the Borg Neural Processors which are used for some reputation projects. This, in my opinion, means it'll be easier for people to get the equipment they want from the various reputations and hopefully use that to become stronger players for the Elite queues.

So I guess overall this is beneficial to the players. I still find the reward structure slightly odd, but I guess looking at it from a larger perspective makes it feel better. Let me know if you think this is good for us or not.

Written by Attilio on June 14, 2015 at 10:18 pm

Comments

Warburton1881(Member) said...June 16, 2015 at 12:15 am

I'm not unhappy with the current system of rewards. Itbeats the heck out of the previous revamp of PvE, where one or two players could prevent the entire team from completing the mission at all. I gave up tying Infected: Conduit and Azure Nebula Rescue because the teams I ended up on made fatal errors at the inception and the missions shut down before they had hardly gotten started. Now, even when the rest of the team messes up we can still get through the mission.

I haven't played an STF since the fail option was introduced on the advanced queues. I used to play them all the time. Hell, I was the one that would -organize- the damn things. I loved them. I have yet to try them again since this newest change has occurred. But, I'm looking forward to it.

I feel like this makes it to big of a jump in difficulty between advanced and elite, now we have normal, normal with harder enemies and elite. Something needed to be changed, getting the resources for rep gear was to hard for people just starting to work on a build, but this change seem to drastic.

I think the changes to Advanced queues is fantastic. Too many times, I've seen advanced missions sabotaged by inexperienced, or obnoxious players. The fact is that players needed the reputation token rewards that advanced missions offered. So, even inexperienced players would join advanced games. This was a problem Cryptic itself created. Now, that problem has been largely mitigated. Ironically, however, with the recent changes to reputation missions, players no longer need to join advanced missions for reputation tokens. It took Cryptic far too long to correct the token player problem and then then implement competing solutions which negatively impact the advanced mission queues they sought to repair. Cryptic...gotta love 'em...:)